Yeah this is my question. My Kindle has been in airplane mode since the day I bought it.
As long as I can still keep loading books on it over USB, and it's just their DRM ecosystem that will stop working, that's fine with me.
But if they are aggressively bricking the units, if I accidentally turn on wifi by accident and it just completely stops working, I will be extremely pissed.
they are not bricking the units. just kindle store won't be available anymore, and the azw/epub version which is supported on your kindles won't be provided anymore by amazon anywhere.
what is on the kindle will stay and keep working.
if you reset the kindle, DRMed content won't work anymore.